Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect whose radical ideas gave rise to hundreds of dysfunctional 1960s tower blocks in Britain, is to undergo a rehabilitation of his reputation with the biggest exhibition of his work ever staged on these shores.

Not all great buildings are made from elaborate, costly materials. Le Corbusier's monastery of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, near Lyon, was built with humble, pure concrete. And, says Jonathan Glancey, it's all the better for that

The name of Charlotte Perriand, who has died aged 96, is inextricably bound up with those classics of modern furniture design - the chaise longue and fauteuil grand confort - which she made in collaboration with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in the late 1920s.

It was an encounter between two great minds: the Swiss prophet of modernism Le Corbusier and the builder of independent India, its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Chandigarh, the first planned city of modern India, was the embodiment in poured concrete of the aspirations of a new-born country, unfettered by the past.